Lord Rennard: ...Student Loans Company, invited to register and reminded of their legal responsibilities to do so. Attainers are a particularly important group. Sixteen and 17 year-olds could be identified through schools. There is a precedent for doing this in Regulations 41 and 42 of the Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2008, under which the previous Government brought in a...
Lord Rennard: ...almost any action by the state, and when it was once famously claimed that there was no such thing as society. The coalition agreement is a complete rejection of that view. We have moved on a great deal if the commitment to what is being called the big society is genuine, and there may now be more consensus in the major parties about achieving the culture change that I hope really...
Lord Rennard: ...I, too, associate myself with all those noble Lords who congratulated my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno on securing this very important debate. He really is my noble friend. I spent a great deal of time in the 1990s trying to help him get elected to the other place. I think the closest we came was in 1992, when he missed by just 995 votes. I have always illustrated talks about...
Lord Rennard: ...view, there is a need for a fundamental review of the franchise for all our elections, going well beyond the scope of this Bill. A few yards from where we are now, I sometimes take questions from school groups visiting Parliament. I suspect that many of us do that. It is a delight to try to answer very many good questions. They vary a great deal. From the youngest ones, I always get,...
Lord Rennard: ...of grants and the use of “undue spiritual influence”. He referred to, “thuggish conduct at polling stations”, and said that the bar for legal challenge is set, “much too high for dealing with intimidatory behaviour during the conduct of the poll”. In presiding over other election courts, he has concluded that these sorts of problems are by no means unique to Tower Hamlets. In...
Lord Rennard: ...all its activities so successfully in future without continued significant public support. I saw for myself how it was succeeding in helping to educate young people who would otherwise be skipping school, often beginning a life of crime, at great expense to their neighbourhood and to all of us if they follow routes leading to imprisonment. The project was helping to get people off drugs...
Lord Rennard: ...the key democratic principle that voting should be about giving people the representation that they vote for. That principle was clearly something that was not achieved on 5 May, and measures to deal with that issue should have featured in the gracious Speech. Something is clearly rotten in a system in which it takes 26,858 votes to elect a Labour MP, 44,241 votes to elect a Conservative...
Lord Rennard: ...participation. But we did not see government willingness to consider what I believe would have been a very worthwhile experiment this time around. Incidentally, it seems strange to me that we are dealing with an issue today that, perhaps, could have been dealt with earlier when we were considering the Bill on European elections extending representation in the European Parliament to the...